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WABE: Hospitals In Georgia, U.S. Charging Insurers More Than Twice Medicare Rates, Study Finds

By Andy Miller September 21, 2020 Hospitals in the United States are charging private insurers 2.5 times what they get paid under the government Medicare program for the same services, according to a study released Friday. In Georgia, hospitals charge private insurers even higher rates, at nearly three times Medicare reimbursements, the RAND Corp. study found. But that’s […]

Vox: I read 1,182 emergency room bills this year. Here’s what I learned.

By Sarah Kliff December 18, 2018 For the past 15 months, I’ve asked Vox readers to submit emergency room bills to our database. I’ve read lots of those medical bills — 1,182 of them, to be exact. My initial goal was to get a sense of how unpredictable and costly ER billing is across the country. There […]

Healthcare Dive: Higher ER prices, case severity boosting spending

By Tony Abraham May 31, 2018 Dive Brief: National emergency room use remained largely unchanged between 2009 and 2016, but new data from the Health Cost Institute shows higher-severity codes were used more frequently, and the average prices for those codes grew more rapidly than lower-severity codes. HCI’s study expands upon previous research characterizing spending, price and utilization for five […]

The Charlotte Observer: Prices soar as hospitals dominate cancer market

By Ames Alexander, Karen Garloch, Joseph Neff April 22, 2015 Large nonprofit hospitals in North Carolina are dramatically inflating prices on chemotherapy drugs at a time when they are cornering more of the market on cancer care, an investigation by the Observer and The News & Observer of Raleigh has found. The newspapers found hospitals […]

Modern Healthcare: Gap between what private insurers and Medicare pay hospitals is growing

By Tara Bannow September 18, 2020 A new study suggests that hospitals’ market power may have a bigger influence on prices than oft-touted factors like compensating for Medicare and Medicaid losses and providing high-quality care. It’s the third and largest iteration of not-for-profit think tank RAND Corp.’s deep dive into how much private insurers pay for inpatient […]

RAND: Nationwide Evaluation of Health Care Prices Paid by Private Health Plans

By Christopher M. Whaley, Brian Briscombe, Rose Kerber, Brenna O’Neill, Aaron Kofner In the United States, low levels of price transparency make it hard for employers and other purchasers of health care to assess the prices that they pay for health care services. Using data from 2016 to 2018, the authors document variation in facility […]

Axios: 1 Big Thing: Hospitals Prices’ Steady Rise

By Caitlin Owens September 18, 2020 Employers and private insurers paid hospitals, on average, 247% of what Medicare paid for the same services in 2018, per a new RAND study. Why it matters: We all pay for this giant gap in prices through our premiums and lost wages. The big picture: The price gap has been growing, with private […]

NYT: Many Hospitals Charge More Than Twice What Medicare Pays for the Same Care

By Reed Abelson September 18, 2020 Hospitals across the country are charging private insurance companies 2.5 times what they get from Medicare for the same care, according to a new RAND Corporation study of hospital prices released on Friday. In a half-dozen of 49 states in the survey, including West Virginia and Florida, private insurers paid three […]

AJMC: Policies to Address Surprise Billing Can Affect Health Insurance Premiums

By Erin L. Duffy, Loren Adler, Erin Trish, PhD September 11, 2020 Objectives: To quantify the proportion of health plan spending on services for which surprise billing is common—provided by radiologists, anesthesiologists, pathologists, emergency physicians, emergency ground ambulances, and emergency outpatient facilities—and estimate the potential impact of proposed policies to address surprise billing on health insurance […]